A blog about smallholding and a 27 year old woman attempting to live more environmentally friendly. So if cooking, grow your own, keeping chickens, baking, cats, sustainability, nature, preserving, hiking, wild swimming, outdoor cookery, camping and foraging are your thing take a read.

Some are classics, some are new additions to the Sutton Seed Catalogue and some are from James Wongs new collection called ‘Home Grown Revolution’. We are starting to plant some of the early starters inside the house in the warm already in the hope we will have some early crops to eat! We have compost pots inside near the windowsills in the hope that the sunshine and the heat will help them get started!

A few seeds I am particularly excited about trying to grow are:

-The Electric Daisies (supposed to taste like sherbet dip dap and I can’t wait to try the recipe included inside-Mango and Electric Daisy sorbet!)

-The Callaloo (a Caribbean variety of spinach which is brightly coloured and can be used in the same way as spinach, watercress or broccoli)

-The Dwarf French Beans (a classic and a great tasty veg always better straight from the veg patch!)

-The Tomatillo (a new interesting addition from the James Wong collection-its a lime flavoured tomato with a high yield-will be trying this in summer salads and fresh salsas I hope!)

These are just a few of the different seeds I received and I hope in the coming months to sow, grow and crop all of them. I will be following their progress and which are the most suitable for the land here, which produce the highest yield and which I find personally the most tasty and the most adaptable for using in recipes in the kitchen. Keep an eye out for regular updates!

If you would like to learn more about Suttons seeds or search for new exciting seeds to boost your crops this year, get old favourites for the allotment or renew gardening equipment take a look at their site:

So after settling into our new house and trying to sort the contract we have good news! Particularly ready for the Spring and Summer coming! We have talked to our landlord and they have given us permission to have a small piece of land near the house. We can use this small piece of land to hopefully grow some veggies and fruit in the spring and summer time. I am currently looking through seed catalogues and researching whats best to grow when. Also have asked some local Swiss friends when we can start planting and sowing seeds-the weather here is very, very different to back home with snow being up here till about april/may time.

Additionally, what is also very exciting is the fact we have also got permission to maybe if we want have some chickens on this land and to build a small chicken house for them! We would love to do this and shall see how we get on! If there is enough time and we can make enough space for a run after we have planned what plants are going in then we might be able to get 2-3 Point of Lays to begin with!

Watch this space for more updates on trying to make the most of rented land and property!

Below: A photograph of a Swiss home made chicken run for 6 chickens on a nearby farm. There is a flat roof on the top of the run to stop snow getting in the run so that the chickens can stay all through the winter season! We hope to be able to make a decent sized chicken run and coop for our chickens if we can get a few in the summer.